To be untidy is to be alive
Unraveling from the need for neat
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A song I’m loving: this was my favorite song senior year of high school. I saw them play in San Francisco and gave them a copy of a CD, handmade cover and all, of songs I wrote.
“Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness.”
Mary Oliver said this in her poem The Bleeding-Heart and it’s a line I’ve been returning to a lot lately. My eyes water every time I read it, like right now — the screen just became blurry — because it is an obvious truth I’ve been trying to accept my whole life, yet one I often fight against. I’ve been taught to strive for neatness: for clarity, for knowing, for linear, for the 1-2-3 progression of everything, for the clean lines and clear Before and Afters and overcomings and I’m-Past-That, for the plan and the schedule and the has-it-all-together. I’ve spent countless hours longing for the answers instead of learning to live the questions, craving the ending instead of moving through the mysterious plot. I’ve been told to control nature, mine included, instead of learn from and listen to it. I’ve found myself in places where I would have done anything to make it all stop — all the wondering and striving, all the pressure and expectation, all the trying to be somewhere else, all the living.
I’ve spent a lot of time forgetting what’s important — and a lot of time forgetting that what’s important lacks a certain neatness.
We think we, and life, are supposed to be neat and tidy, organized and ready for the photo-op. We think the sign of readiness is a lack of tangle, a lack of messiness. We assume we’re the messed up ones if our behind-the-scenes secrets and processes and next steps don’t look as clear-cut and set in stone as they seem to for “everyone else”. We see people continuously presenting themselves as having made it, only to present the same thing a year later in a different way, revealing they hadn’t actually made it. We revere stories of making it through to the “other side” yet turn away from (in others and ourselves) the murky bits, the middle of the night worries, the months and years spent desperate for something different.
Living is important; living isn’t neat.
I’m in the middle of something that feels important to me — something that feels necessary and right, like the truest thing I could move toward during this season of my life. And it doesn’t feel neat at all. And when I hear the manifestation babes telling me what’s meant for us will be easy and effortless, I look at what I’m called to and question it instead of questioning the idea that the truest things must contain ease. Yet I know from experience that something being meant for us — something being important — doesn’t mean it won’t contain a mess to move through.
What’s meant for us won’t always be easy, effortless, natural, neat. Sometimes, what is meant for me is hard. Sometimes it’s a long slog instead of a smooth ride. Sometimes it pokes and prods — it doesn’t always soothe and satiate. Sometimes, what is meant for me takes a lot longer than I wish it did, and feels more like crashing into a breaking wave, salty water in my nose and everything, than floating on a serene lake. Sometimes, what is meant for me causes doubt and hesitancy, circling thoughts and shallow breathing. Sometimes it feels out of reach, even when it’s right here.
What is meant for me will not always be easy and effortless; what’s important isn’t always neat. Perhaps this isn’t because I’m out of alignment, or not approaching it correctly, or doing it wrong — perhaps it isn’t because I haven’t made the proper initiations or moved through all the rites of passage in the correct order; perhaps this just means being a person is a lot more complex and complicated than those trying to sell us constant ease and tidiness want us to believe. Perhaps it isn’t ours to fix at all, but ours to welcome, embrace, accept, understand, lean into, learn from, allow.
And, none of this is because ease isn’t available. It is. But I wonder if ease is found moment to moment, in between the breaking wave, rather than a place we need to get to for the rest of time. I wonder if ease, like challenge, is simply part of the whole, rather than something to constantly feel like we’re falling short of. I wonder if ease isn’t always a result of something being meant for us, but is instead a result of us searching for the softness, the light, the moments of respite, the landing places, right in between the crunchiness, the confusion, the longing, the efforting, the work.
“Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness.”
The linear path is enticing. It sounds so much simpler, doesn’t it? Do A and B will happen. Yet when we think we’re missing steps because the path isn’t so straightforward, we forget the cyclical, seasonal nature of being alive. We forget all the outside forces that are at play right alongside our own desires. We forget the systems that often hold power in ways we can’t sway moment to moment. We forget we aren’t robots and our own energy, capacity, willingness, and ability are always shifting, forever changing. We forget about the ways we’re forced to fill our time to the brim, the caregiving we do, the jobs we work, the duties we complete, the responsibilities we tend to. And all of this swirled together creates anything but neatness. It creates anything but clearcut. It creates anything but a straight line. And suddenly the wobbliness, the messiness, the confusion, the lost-ness, the two steps forward one step back, the windy road, the not-neat makes a lot more sense. And we hopefully remember to lack a certain neatness isn’t us lacking; it’s life being itself.
To be untidy is to be alive.
“Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness.”
When I hold this as true, I care less about neat. I want to let it all be untidy.
Letting it all be untidy means dropping my ideas about how it should go so I can more fully lean into how it’s actually going.
Letting it all be untidy means surrendering to the pace that is most true, rather than the pace I assume will take the least amount of time or effort.
Letting it all be untidy means noticing where I’m projecting an idealized version of the present onto the real version of it, and choosing to turn back toward the real.
Letting it all be untidy means seeing the grief and longing as intricate pieces of the whole instead of deterrents from fully living, from growing, from thriving.
Letting it all be untidy means trusting the unpaved path, the unclear outcome, the longing to do the thing before having clarity around how it will go.
Letting it all be untidy means looking at the pile of dishes or the unswept floor and seeing them as visions of tending to what matters more instead of proof of inadequacy.
Letting it all be untidy means making room for setbacks and confusion, for impatience and envy, for the things we’re told to either hide or quickly clean up.
Letting it all be untidy means allowing what is true to be true, within myself and within my relationships and within my work and within my life.
Sometimes, what matters isn’t tidy; sometimes, what is true isn’t neat.
And perhaps that isn’t a problem as much as it is a reflection of being more alive than I would be if I spent all my energy tidying instead of living.
May you find what’s important and let it lack a certain neatness.
May you find what matters right inside the tangle.
May you find the aliveness right inside the swirl.
△ Melissa Febos on Turning Toward a More Authentic Life
△ Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency
△ I re-read Big Magic recently and remembered how good it is
△ I finished You Could Make This Place Beautiful and adored it
△ Finding True Refuse in this Living Dying World
△ This tincture has been making my sparkling water more nurturing
△ This poem:
△ And this poem:
With care,
Lisa
Omg the "manifestation babes"!🤣 Yes yes yessss: Life is both challenge and ease. If we accept this as true, the question becomes, "How am I relating to this? If it's all a dance, how am I dancing with this?"
the less tidy something is, the more untouched it is: the more it remains the raw, bare materials of your becoming.
after all, if something is only your own, why should you expect someone else to have come along and tidied things up before you?
I am reminded of Jonathan Wells' 'April Morning':
You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.
This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.
these days are your becoming.